New notes

In discussing the many ways that students might want to share, review their work, find new tools or activities, back up their work, visualize, schedule, or otherwise handle daily life, we came up with a number of general concepts suitable for hacking one's life at any age and in any location. A little "hack my life" (HML) primer, along with a primer for getting joy out of the XO, may be appropriate at some point.

Earlier notes

Pilot: Any project with less than 5,000 laptops in the same school or community with the goal of supplying an XO to every primary school age child.

Deployment: Any project with more than 5,000 laptops in the same region that has been launched with significant engagement by national educational leaders, with a goal of of supplying an XO to every primary school age child.

I'm moving my weekly journal out into OLPC:News/2008 for all to collaborate there. Please add your own links, news, notes, updates, and (very brief) comments. If you are working regularly on any sort of local project related to OLPC, including education, curation, software, electronics, peripherals, reporting, roadshows, documentation, or art, be bold and add your updates directly to the latest week's page.

OLPC Deutschland is having a wicked good time with Jim at LinuxTag. Here is a LinuxTag flyer they designed... Others there include Bert F., Bernie, and H0lger. Leave comments if you've had a chance to visit them or attend any of their presentations!

Join us

We are collecting all the free books, movies, music, and other content
that we can in the next five days. Then, on Tuesday (2/19) the
Creative Commons will be burning a
LiveDVD as part of [http://wiki.creativecommons.org/LiveContent_2.0 LiveContent
2.0] with the selection of CC licensed materials that we are gathering --- this DVD
will be distributed to events such as South by Southwest and elsewhere. The bundle of books and educational resources we collect will be used by OLPC to send all over the world for children,
families, and schools! And Textbook Revolution will compiling
and reviewing the best college-level resources they can find for the coming re-launch of their new, community driven site.

On Saturday, there will be a hackathon/jam at Olin college. If you are planning a similar jam or barcamps, add it to the list above!

Universe

Here is a small universe of developing ideas about many aspects of the project. Feel free to dive in and edit or comment directly on those pages.
I'm considering what core use cases are being prohibited by opportunistic order of operations in implementing our vision. 20:51, 8 January 2008 (EST)

User needs

Learning how to use your own machine means being able to use normal developer toolchains once you get down to a shell -- having man pages, syntax-highliting editors, and compiler toolchains available or hinted at should be a bare minimum. Learning to hack your system shouldn't require jumping through extra hoops that others would not have to. Alternately, there should be provisions in place to create space for students and teachers to set up services or do development on school servers. This and useful 'view source' keybindings are needed to start breaking into one's own systems and making interesting discoveries.

Bundling up

The first notion of bundle is an executable collection of code and supporting material, along with the objects that it can read or store. Bundles are shared or distributed as a whole; objects they create can be shared or reused individually.

There is also a notion of a generic bundle -- a simple way to throw a few objects together and label them, for the purposes of sharing. It may be helpful to have a bundle manager activity, which helps find what exists (rather than the Journal, finding what people have done).

Security discussions around bundles have focused on the idea that they are all executable. Generic bundles will likely not fall under this regime. We should think about an intermediate level of security that supports some sort of group stamping by community groups. This would let anyone who wants to use and test and review new activities can play with a reasonable but not completely stable/approved set of activities.

A budding publishing career

Lulu has some delightful collections of books. Some authors publish entire series of free texts on their own; others see using the channel for self-publishing as an art form in itself. My favorite author is currently cedric du zob -- his abstracts and book summaries alone are worth a read, and I fear that actually reading any of his work might ruin my fine first impressions.

Sites such as Lulu and Flickr, whose primary purposes are not to highlight free works - but in these cases to provide tools for meaningful self-publishing, or a social sites for storing and sharing photos - have been remarkably successful at attracting collections of free works, all the same. This jibes with my feeling that a focus on freedom is at best of temporary interest, as it is the natural state of sharing and creativity which only seems imperiled while we have a culture that teaches that sharing should only be done with care, or that the way to succeed is to carefully control the use of ideas, and imagines high barriers to creation and distribution.